Lots of motoring enthusiasts really rate them as driver’s cars, for the feel , the looks and the sound, to the point where some say you can’t be a real “petrol-head” until you’ve owned one.

However, they have a history of unreliability, poor build quality and after-sales support that even people who work for them say is woeful.

But people still buy them. There’s just something about them as a product that keeps people hoping above expectation that the overall experience will be good, rather than an exercise in masochism.

What I don’t know is if people buy more than one, and that’s certainly something Apple appear to have no problems with.

I suspect that the love/hate response to Apple is complex and mutli-faceted. Some won’t like them because in some markets they’ve shifted from plucky underdog to major player, some other people might have a “I liked them before they were famous,” thing going on, others just might set the hype bar so high they can’t fail to be disappointed by a firm that ultimately exists to make money for its shareholders.

I don’t think that the situation, or the army of fanboys, has changed much; what has changed is the market share and the diversification into different markets, hence the wider exposure of their practices, and the responses to those practices by a greater number of thinking consumers. The problem is, they still make better products. They just do. By which I mean more polished, more integrated, better designed, yadda yadda, and sure, more expensive, but for the market, it’s just better. Consumers, creative pros, etc, and they manage to keep the developers on side with the space-age APIs, toolkits, 64-bit, UNIX, blah, blah blah. How many other companies do that? The strapline should be something like “Apple: we’re evil, but we’re goood”. (I should be in marketing. Gor’s Truth Marketing Agency.)

Also, this freedom and openness business is really a lot more about developers and hippies. Not only do developers come back in their droves even if they do get pissed off about NDAs and so on, because ultimately they know it’s a good platform with good tools, good support and good infrastructure – and the channel to market for their product is astounding – but frankly, most consumer users couldn’t give a shit. They just want it smooth, integrated, working out of the box, looking nice. Why pander to a minority if your bottom line’s the issue?

@flipper02: It’s not about hating something you thought you’d love. I’m arguing that the love is there for the product, but the hate is for the brand. The torment would not be there if it was simply a mistake purchase. The torment exists because pleasure is still gained but with a constant discomfort with all that comes with it. A bit like a drug.

I’m a hater fan too.

One of the things I hate about Apple is the walled-garden they create around their products and services. Everything is billed as some shiney ‘premium’ service that you should apparently be happy to pay for, at the expense of your wallet and freedom. Apple are becoming notorious for trying pen users and developers into their way of doing things – and extremely arrogant and dangerous tactic.

The fiasco over the iPhone NDA, and App Store is a good example of this actually – they’re seriously pissing off the very developers they rely on to make these Apps. Those very developers have taken the (imho) big risk in learning and targeting a closed-source, non-free licensed platform, only for Apple to treat them like shit in a lot of cases.

These days, being open is favoured by users and developers alike. The freedom to take what’s rightfully yours (be it data or services) and move it where you want. Android, HTML5, OpenID, OpenSocial and the like are all efforts to standardise the core bits of important technology so that the user doesn’t end up being locked into one platform or company.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Apple don’t care what kind of experiences you want to have with their products. They’re more interested in the experience that THEY want you to have – pushing their lifestyle/ethos upon users, instead of listening to what they want. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s something that is unique to Apple. Within weeks of the iPhone launch and since there have been websites where people have petitioned in their thousands for Apple to add features like MMS, Copy/Paste, modem tethering, etc to the iPhone. Why?! It’s fascinating that those people don’t ridicule Apple for not putting in those features in the first place (like they would if it was Nokia, Motorola, etc would released a mobile with a host of missing features), wash their hands of Apple, walk away, and buy another phone.

Many Apple consumers don’t seem to be willing to give up the sexy products in light of missing features of obvious problems. Instead, they plead with them to fix them, wait on tenterhooks for 18 months for the new product, wait in line for 12 hours to get it on launch day and then announce that Apple are the best technology company in the world and “OMG AWESOME MY PHONE CAN COPY AND PASTE NOW TAKE THAT MICRO$OFT!1″

Weird.